And the winner is...
07 July 2009
A week ago last Thursday I spent most of a tiring day at the start of a heatwave driving cars around central London near Imperial College. This was not a mad whim or some sort of life swap, but part of helping to judge the ‘Green Car of the Year 2009' awards for the What Green Car? website.
What Green Car was set up by academic and consultant Dr Ben Lane as a result of a research project he carried out in 2006 to assess the lifetime impact of a range of cars - research that was actually commissioned by my local Council in Camden.
Looking at the environmental cost of manufacturing and transporting parts and fuel around the world, as well as the impact of the various emissions coming out of the exhaust pipe, it became clear to Ben that simply judging the greenness of a car just on its fuel consumption wasn't enough. Cars with apparently zero emissions do not have zero impact on the planet and, although some of the more ridiculous claims made by big 4x4 manufacturers that ‘a Hummer has a lower total impact than a Prius' in the disproved Dust to Dust report from a few years back turned out to be rubbish, it became obvious that a more sophisticated measure was needed.
So, the What Green Car? rating was born, analysing the whole life impact of a vehicle and placing it on a scale from 0 (perfectly green) to 100 (massively ungreen), the ratings provide a much clearer guide to the real cost of running a car and allow comparisons to be made between different ‘zero emission' vehicles as well.
The ratings make judging the award an easier job, too - a large part of what we needed to look at had been helpfully summarised in the figures, so the job was mainly to compare the practicality and driving ‘experience' of the cars and judge which was the most impressive in terms of being a breakthrough in bringing new technologies or innovations to the mainstream.
Importantly, the awards are for cars actually in production and on sale in the UK, which meant that the excellent ‘Think!' electric car was out of the running since our lack of infrastructure for recharging means the company won't sell its cars here yet, and the handy G-Wiz didn't count either, as it's officially a ‘quadricycle' not a motor car due to its low power. For the first time, however, two pure electric vehicles were on the shortlist (the Citroen C1 evie and the Mitsubishi iMiEV) although neither have yet properly launched here so we couldn't test them.
The cars we did drive were the Toyota IQ, the Ford Fiesta ECOnetic, the new Toyota Prius hybrid, the Honda Insight hybrid, the BMW 3-series diesel (yes that's right, a beamer) and the VW Passat BlueMotion.
How did they do? Well, here's the bit I'm dreading since I can't even refer to a driving ‘experience' without splashing self-conscious quotes all over the place. Also, since the last time I drove any car at all was four years ago (and that was in a straight line down the Autobahn during a very long road trip to Croatia) I spent my time in the first few cars concentrating mainly on remembering how to drive.
So, while I'll do my best to channel my inner Clarkson and say something useful, I'm simply not going to be able to review these cars in any way that'll satisfy a car owner with a genuine interest in finding out how they handle. Where available, linsk to What Green Car's reviews are provided for those who want to read something more helpful.
Toyota IQ
Green rating: 27
CO2: 99 g/km
MPG: 65.7 (combined)
Engine: Petrol, 998 cc
Price from: £9,495
This city car made the shortlist mainly because it's a petrol car that emits less than 100 g/km of CO2, thanks to something called ‘Toyota Optimal Drive'. Most ‘green' cars that get these kinds of figures are diesels which, despite best efforts with filters, trade a worsening of local air pollution with NOx and particulates for their gains in climate emissions. It also looks brilliant, in fact almost exactly like a stormtrooper's helmet from Star Wars.
Unfortunately, though it's billed as a four seater that can fit an adult and a child in the back, the rear bench area is very cramped, especially in the leg room department. So, if you're one of those families where dad drives and likes to sit four and half feet away from the steering wheel, you can really only put a baby behind him, and you can only fit an adult next to them if the passenger seat is pushed forward quite a bit. Looking at the back seat reminded me a lot of childhood summer drives to Essex from Cheltenham squashed in the back of my dad's Ford Capri, so I suspect a similar level of car-sickness inducingness from this arrangement too.
That said, there are probably many couples and family units it would suit for a few years at least, and it is an improvement on the 2-seater SMART, but it didn't quite qualify for the ‘breakthrough family petrol car' prize, I'm afraid.
Its little 1 litre engine also felt a bit underpowered and, despite the lack of space inside, it didn't feel quite as nippy as some small cars do with engines this size. I can really blame the car completely for this, however, since I kept trying to take off from the lights in third gear, which can't have done it any good at all.
Ford Fiesta ECOnetic
Green rating: 29
CO2: 98 g/km
MPG: 76.3 (combined)
Engine: Diesel, 1560 cc
Price from: £12,445
Hard to know what to say about this, apart from ‘it's a Ford Fiesta'. Most of the cars I've ever driven have been Fords, so this was much easier to get the hang of and, with a 1.6 litre diesel engine, it was clearly more powerful than the Toyota, on about the same CO2 emissions and overall green rating, and all with a proper back seat thrown in.
Overall, it was hard to tell you were in a green car at all. It was all just so completely normal, easy to drive and as spacious as a Fiesta ever is. Anyone with two children or fewer, and no horses, has absolutely no reason to need anything bigger.
BMW 318d E90
Green rating: 34
CO2: 123 g/km
MPG: 60.1 (combined)
Engine: Diesel, 1995 cc
Price from: around £23,000
This is the first time I've driven anything with more than a 1.8 litre engine, or anything with six gears, so I can't compare it to others ‘in its class', but it was definitely a much smoother drive than the others, and this despite my forgetting to change up out of 2nd when I should have - something the engine seemed to cope with very well, even at 30 mph along Bayswater Road.
Apparently, it achieves its good CO2 rating and fuel economy with a combination of regenerative braking and a stop-start function that cuts the engine in neutral and automatically restarts it when you put the car back in gear. I didn't get to assess how well this worked because, for once, the test route around Hyde Park was relatively clear and I didn't hit a single red light.
By this stage, either my driving was getting better or being in a BMW gains you automatic respect, as this was the first circuit of Marble Arch where I didn't get rudely pushed around and beeped at by the white vans and taxis who hang around there all day like sinister motorised gangs of hoodies.
Comfort-wise, the BMW is a much bigger car, and therefore much more spacious inside. However, the extra 20% in price and fuel consumption versus the very slightly smaller hybrids, probably isn't worth it unless you have a very specific need for the extra space, or a very pressing urge to own a BMW.
Honda new Insight hybrid
Green rating: 34
CO2: 101 g/km
MPG: 64.2 (combined)
Engine: Petrol hybrid, 1339 cc
Price from: 15,490
This car got a lot of stick during our pre-test judging discussions, mainly because previous hybrids from Honda have been so far behind the Toyota Prius in terms of performance and comfort. However, as the first hybrid I've been in control of, I found it incredibly easy to drive and, although the engine is smaller than the Prius or BMW, it was quite good at accelerating up to driving speed, even if there was a very short delay after hitting the pedal before it started up. I didn't notice much difference from the Prius around town, but we didn't test it on the motorway, where the Prius with its bigger engine presumably has the edge.
Honda has also made quite an effort with the dashboard display, showing you a range of visual clues as to how your eco-driving is going, including a colour-coded digital speedometer and a curious flower-building ‘game', where a graphical display of flowers gradually builds (or presumably disappears) as you drive in more or less economical ways.
As the car is an automatic, however, it's hard to know how you might drive it more or less well. This was therefore the only circuit so far where I was consistently in the correct gear, so easily my greenest drive yet, although the overall green rating of this car is slightly inferior to the other smaller cars, and actually equal to the BMW, presumably due to its dual engines' manufacturing costs. At 101 g/km and with a petrol engine, its emissions alone have around the same impact as the Fiesta and IQ, and it is a much more spacious car than either.
Toyota new Prius Hybrid
Green rating: 33
CO2: 89 g/km
MPG: 72.4 (combined)
Engine: Petrol hybrid, 1798 cc
Price from: £18,370
The final car I tested, and with my driving getting better by the minute and another smooth automatic transmission to deal with, this was literally a joy to conduct around the circuit.
Emissions-wise, for this new Prius, Toyota have pulled off the conjuring trick of simultaneously increasing the size of the engine and cutting the CO2 by more than 10% to a princely 89 g/km. This is the lowest out of all the non-electric cars in the running for the award, yet in a car that feels distinctly powerful and solid. It also looks really good, and Ben Lane was so taken with it that he kept likening it to an iPhone. It's not quite as attractive as that, but nevertheless isn't something anyone could possibly object to being seen with.
Among my fellow judges were Ian Featherstone, the fleet advice manger from the Energy Savings Trust and Tom Pakenham, the founder of the Green Tomato all-hybrid taxi service, and both were similarly bowled over by the new engine and the comfort inside, though all the experienced Prius drivers among the judges agreed that the updated displays were not an improvement, as they had taken away the clever representation of the two engines, which showed the energy flows around the vehicle as you drove, and replaced it with a much plainer and more standard looking graphic equalizer style display.
That apart, the judges' decision in the end was unanimously in favour of the Prius being the Green Car of the Year, seeing as none of the others had ticked half as many boxes in terms of space, power, loveliness to drive and look at, or the raw sustainability figures. While making two engines and all those batteries adds slightly to the overall green score compared with the smaller cars, the CO2 figure was so impressive that this didn't stop it being the winner overall.
In choosing just two cars for further ‘commendation' we had a harder task, as all the other cars had their charms. In the end we went for three - the BMW for bringing an executive car down to green ratings most superminis were struggling to achieve a few years ago; the Insight, for getting closer than we expected to being as good as the Prius, for a much lower price; and the Fiesta, for invisibly turning a reliable, affordable, ‘normal' small hatchback into a green machine.
It would have been great to have been able to recognise one of the pure electric models too, but the fact that neither were available for test drives underlined the fact that these aren't quite yet the mass-manufactured mainstream cars we'd like them to be. That said, if you're a mainly city driver with off street parking, get one if you can, since with overall green ratings of 10 or less they are by far the lowest impact cars and extremely cheap to run. Next year, I hope that better infrastructure and increased availability will combine to make an EV the overall winner - that will really be a market breakthrough worth celebrating.
Me
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